Government Lite or Government Big Gulp

"I want to live for immortality, and I will accept no compromise." In the same way, if he had decided that God and immortality did not exist, he would at once have become an atheist and a socialist. For socialism is not merely the labor question, it is before all things the atheistic question, the question of the form taken by atheism to-day, the question of the tower of Babel built without God, not to mount to heaven from earth but to set up heaven on earth. - Fyodor Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov

Reject them.

Reject the people like Sean Hannity who would have you believe that somehow America’s changed to socialism.

“The reality is that America is changing…the allure and the appeal of socialism and redistribution of wealth has taken hold with about half the electorate,” he said according to a blog post on CNS by Gregory Gwyn-Williams.

He continues: “I think we have to face a reality that maybe America is no longer the center-right country that it once was…America has been conditioned now to be an entitlement society.”

The illusion that we haven’t been marching down this road, redistributing wealth, abusing so-called “entitlements,” as well as taxpayers, for at least as long as I have been alive has been propagated for too long by Republicans such as Hannity.

The truth is that if socialism is redistribution of wealth, then America’s been socialist for quite a while.

When the federal government guarantees student loans, mortgages, retirement and healthcare- yes, healthcare has been guaranteed in this country for as long as we’ve required emergency rooms to treat anyone who walks in- that’s socialism.

Cradle-to-grave socialism; covert socialism perhaps; but socialism.

I like Sean Hannity very much. But he needs to know why he’s wrong if we expect to get a different result.

Look, we have an historic opportunity to roll back government, to kill the New Deal, to reclaim the American Dream still, but not if we treat the moment as an hysterical opportunity.

Every two years I am told that “this election is the most important in history.”

And then I am told that because it’s so important that I should lower my standards just this much in order to support a guy- or gal- who can win, but won’t represent any substantial policy difference from his opponent.